CLIVE BRANSON

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Sunday Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

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Clive Branson 1907-1944, was born at Ahmednagar, India. He was an English artist, poet, soldier and an active communist. He studied at the Slade School of Art. He was an Impressionist and Modernist. But he deliberately adopted a naïve manner, as a rejection of high-end art.

Branson fought in the Spanish civil war, where as a prisoner of war at the Nationalist camp of San Pedro de Cardeña, he painted and sketched, the camp and many of its inmates. Later, during the WW-II, he served the British army in Burma (Myanmar), where he died.

Branson painted many Battersea street scenes during the blitz. He painted grounds area with some unsophisticated realism, but the skies are filled with forms of surrealistic nature that belie the actual war-time appendages. He painted exteriors of buildings as part of the scenic compositions, but except for the painting of the Indian home interior, never touched the interiors of British Industrial units. His communism was more of the political activism, and less of socialism. 

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